Protection and revitalization of traditional villages in the New Era: Institutional innovation, governance collaboration, and technological empowerment

The protection, renewal and revitalization of traditional villages are major practical issues for achieving rural revitalization and Chinese-style modernization in China. As a popular field of interdisciplinary research, it systematically explores theoretical logic and practical paths. Twelve experts from fields of geography, architecture, planning, finance, culture and tourism, and management were invited for in-depth interviews and dialogues, spreading to top-level institutional design, protection, control and constraints, departmental management and enterprise operation and maintenance, talent and multi-subject intervention, and the empowerment of new technology iterations. Based on expert insights, the protection and revitalization of traditional villages in China in the New Era need to focus on the following key points: (1) Taking top-level institutional design as the foundation. It is urgently necessary to safeguard the main rights and interests of villagers through a mechanism that links property rights confirmation with income. Resource endowments are relied upon to implement precise classification of industrial strategies to build a multi-party collaborative governance framework and balance the integration model of culture and tourism. (2) Taking protection, control and restraint as the bottom line. Based on the dialectical relationship between protection and development, flexible guidance and control mechanisms and negative list management have been practiced to balance the demands of heritage protection and improvement of people's livelihood. (3) Governance coordination and financing innovation serve as the driving forces. It is necessary to clarify the boundaries of responsibilities and collaborative processes among multiple departments to distinguish the intervention logic of various types of enterprises. Through innovative approaches such as special bonds, green credit, protection funds and "whole village asset package" financing, the bottleneck of scattered property rights and long-term returns has been broken. (4) It is guaranteed by the rooting of talents and multi-party governance. The core lies in the comprehensive introduction mechanism, industrial platform, governance model and long-term incentive mechanism to reconstruct a virtuous cycle of symbiotic development between talents and villages. Technical experts should be incorporated into the decision-making system to achieve collaborative governance. (5) Supported by technological empowerment, digital records, open cloud platforms and artificial intelligence technologies are adopted to achieve efficient spatial information acquisition, dynamic monitoring and early warning, as well as remote expert guidance. The predicament of insufficient technical support in remote villages is expected to be resolved. Overall, it is necessary to achieve a balance between the protection of traditional village heritage and sustainable renewal and revitalization through a systematic linkage of institutional innovation, flexible control, multi-party collaboration, talent cultivation, and technological empowerment.